Hugh Bailey: Job-killers and life-savers all at once

Published 12:15 pm, Saturday, April 27, 2013

On this, Richard Blumenthal has never minced words: "The L'Ambiance disaster shows the cost of inaction and real-life consequences to workers and their families when the government fails in this most basic responsibility -- protecting workers when employers unconscionably put profit above safety."

Profit above safety. For all the trust we're supposed to place in the free market to run our lives, experience shows that, unless the government forces them to do otherwise, there are people who will put a higher value on their own profits than the safety of those who work for them.

Blumenthal was referring, as he often has over the years, to the disaster in Bridgeport 26 years ago last week that left 28 people dead when an apartment building under construction collapsed on top of them.

He could just as easily have been referring to the 14 people dead last week in a small town in Texas. Or to 300-plus people who died when a factory on the other side of the world collapsed just days ago.

These are deaths that could have been avoided, but only if we were able to treat sensible regulation as a necessity instead of a burden. And if we treated workers' lives as worth what it costs to protect them.

In Bridgeport, the L'Ambiance Plaza disaster in 1987 led to investigations and changes in allowable construction techniques. But the aftermath showed, as Blumenthal has noted, that the danger was apparent long before the collapse. Profit took precedence over safety. It took 28 deaths to put a stop to a clearly hazardous technique.

In Texas, the explosion at a fertilizer plant on April 17 in the town of West is another story of unnecessary deaths brought on by insufficient regulation.

Some of that is on the people and agencies charged with overseeing the plant, where there seems to have been hundreds of times more than was permitted of the kind of fertilizer used in the Oklahoma City bombing. The facility apparently did not have sprinklers, fire alarms or legally required blast walls.

It's also a good example of why zoning exists. The government telling you what you can and can't do on your property is about as stark an example of regulation as you'll find. But it serves a purpose. As a rule, it's not a good idea to put a nursing home, apartment building and a school next to a plant storing highly combustible fertilizer.

Better regulation might have prevented the explosion from leveling dozens of homes. It's cheaper to ignore those concerns.

Then there was the building collapse last week in faraway Bangladesh, where at least 300 factory workers who make very little money producing clothes sold for prices they could never afford died preventable deaths. This came months after a fire in a different factory there that killed more than 100 people.

These are the kind of mass workplace tragedies we don't often see in this country anymore. Companies have long since shipped those jobs and whatever dangers accompany them far out of sight, where it's easier to scrimp on basic safety features like fire exits, or even structurally sound buildings.

This, too, is the triumph of profits over safety, even if we choose to ignore it in all but the most spectacular catastrophes.

There's no such thing as perfect safety. There will always be accidents, even if it's on the highway getting to work in the morning. Still, people die every day because it's considered too expensive to ensure a safe workplace.

It's true, as they say, that regulations are job-killers. They can also be life-savers. It's helpful to have those priorities in order.